[clue-tech] uninstall procedure

[marcus hall]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 06:18:33PM -0500, Louis Miller wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>        I use Ubuntu. I have always gone into add/remove to uninstall
> programs, but I never thought, until now, that all of the programs I
> had uninstalled had been available through the Debian repositories.
> I want to uninstall Skype. I can't go into add/remove and uncheck
> the tick box. How do you do it?
> 
> Louis

If the programs were installed via a makefile, that is, if you built the
program and did a "make install" to install it (or "sudo make install"),
and *IF* you still have the directory that you built it in, chances are
that you can do a "make uninstall" and it will remove the installed files.

If you installed it by un-tarring a file (something like the command:
"tar xf fubar.tar -C /"), then you can get the list of files from the
tar file ("tar vf fubar.tar") and either manually remove them, or feed
that to "xargs rm" (NB: check the file list twice or more, this could
potentially really trash your system if you get it wrong!  It's working
without a net.)

Basically, you have to find whatever method you used to install the
program and either perform a coresponding uninstall procedure that was
hopefully provided with the install procedure, or else reverse engineer the
install procedure to undo it.

One last thought is to generate a list of all files owned by an installed
package (rpm -qal on rpm based systems would do this, don't know about deb
based systems, but there likely is some equivalent) and diff that against
the files on your filesystem.  Then, decide which of the files are your own
files and which are other installed programs that you want to remove.  Of
course, this won't undo edits to system files,...

marcus hall